The graphics of the flight simulator have improved significantly over the last days, with a new atmospheric ambient light and screenspace ambient occlusion. There is also an update to the 3D model of the cockpit. I can't update to Bevy 0.18 yet, but I will do that asap.
After running into some dead ends, the flight simulator now has better and more accurate mesh collisions with the physics migrated to Avian3D. I also made a new helicopter model with decals and some lights, but it's not finished yet.
After a few days of struggling, I finally realised that it would be easier to make helicopter flight dynamics with Bevy Rapier, and it works now! Flying the helicopter in the simulator is probably as hard as flying a real one.
Was up way too late last night playing my new game FlightGear. I'd tried it once before on a previous computer but couldn't get it working, but now it's working fine. It's open source, and just happens to have all my favorite planes:
I have been getting back into civil flight simulation again. It doesn't look as stunning as Microsoft Flight Simulator, but with Orthophotos it's still pretty good. And it runs natively on Linux!